THE IMF

The International Monetary Fund (IMF)

The IMF is an international organization which has over 185 member countries. The IMF was funded by John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter in 1944, and its basic objective is to stabilize exchange rates and oversee the reconstruction of the international payment system. In addition the IMF promotes international monetary cooperation, and orderly exchange arrangements in order to develop economic growth and high levels of employment. One of the biggest missions of the IMF is to provide temporary financial assistance to countries to help them ease their external debt. The basic purposes for what the IMF was created remain the same, however, the IMF has adjust the way it carries out it operations to meet the changing needs of the member countries. The three main operations of the IMF are: surveillance, lending, and technical assistance. The first one deals with the monitoring of economic and financial developments. Furthermore, it provides policy advice aimed especially to prevent crisis. The second major task of the IMF is lending to countries with problems paying their external debt. Finally the IFM provides technical assistance to countries in its areas of expertise. The IMF is able to do such things Supporting all three of these activities is IMF work in statistical and economic research. Ever since the IMF has been around world trade has tripled from 1960 to 2005. There are people who have negative criticism against organizations such as the IFM and the World Bank. People like John Perkins author of the book “confessions of an economic hit man” claims from experience that “the U.S. [and allies] use globalization to cheat poor countries out of Trillions.” His main point is that the so mentioned and worshiped economic growth of the past decades has just helped the upper level classes, and made the poor even poorer. Moreover EHM’s through out the world have manipulated such economic data to encourage poor countries to borrow and then have IFM bailed them out once they can meet their payments. In My opinion is really hard to tell whether organizations like the IMF really help poor countries or it just helps the world’s top corpocracy to keep them down.